Transfer open applications between a computer and a cellphone

A new system lets you transfer open applications between a computer and a cellphone simply by pointing the phone’s camera at the computer’s screen.

Have you ever found yourself looking up directions on your computer just before running out the door, only to end up retyping the same addresses and mapping the same route on your phone minutes later? A new system designed by Tsung-Hsiang Chang, a graduate student in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Google’s Yang Li makes it much easier to transfer computing tasks between devices. Simply take a photo of your computer screen with your smartphone’s camera, and the phone automatically opens up the corresponding application in the corresponding state. The same process can also work in reverse, moving data from the phone to a desktop computer.

The system, called Deep Shot, exploits the fact that many Web applications use a standard format, called the uniform resource identifier (URI), to describe the states they’re in.

A demonstration showing how Deep Shot works